The Details Of What Information The Police Can Suck Out Of Your Phone

A better idea would be a multiple step one.

As someone who regularly tinkers with Android devices, I would suggest people interested in completely erasing info on their phone do the following:

Install either AeGis or Cerberus to their phones. Both allow you to remotely wipe your phone. (The former through SMS messages sent to it, the latter from a web interface or through SMS messages.)

Also, install a Custom Recovery (either ClockworkMod Recovery or TWRP). The reason for this is that it will allow you to boot into this custom recovery where you can manually wipe your phone. By which I mean, wipe it entirely. (So be careful using this, if you don’t have a ROM zip file to flash afterwards you won’t be able to do much with your phone besides turn it off and turn it on to boot into the recovery.)

The process for wiping manually is simple, boot into the custom recovery and select Wipe Data/Factory Reset. That’s it, your entire phone will be wipe. Then, as is standard for “full wipe” standards (recommended when installing any new ROMs), select Wipe Cache. After which, you can go into Advanced and then select Wipe Dalvik Cache. (Usually this is done with just Wipe Cache, but it never hurts to go in and do this one in addition to Wipe Cache).

Once you’ve done all that, your phone will have literally nothing on it. (Keeping in mind that anything stored on the micro SD card or “SD card”, and the reason I put that in quotes is because some phones have flash memory built in accessible as the “SD card” in lieu of having an actual micro SD card slot for use, WILL still remain on your phone.)

Now, in addition to that, you can simply get a Wipe All zip (of which there are many, and which needs to be tailored to your specific Android device) and just flash that in recovery. To do so you would just go into Install zip from SD card and then Select zip from SD card and locate the zip you wish to flash. (Per what I mentioned above about anything on the SD card’s remaining intact, keep in mind there are flashable zips that WILL wipe everything including what’s on your SD card. You just have to look for them and make sure it does or doesn’t specifically wipe the SD card.)

Any of these would be a good idea for those wanting to keep data on their phones from falling into someone else’s hands. If anyone needs specific information or links to the custom recoveries/flashable zips for a particular device or wants additional information regarding rooting/installing custom recoveries/etc just let me know. Try and be specific regarding your device model and current version of Android on it (also if you’re rooted or not). I’m more than happy to help.